As the cost of hardware steadily diminishes, the cost of developing software to run on stored program controlled machines, e.g. computers becomes increasingly significant. A well recognised problem is caused by the relative ease with which software, once developed, can be copied say from one magnetic disk to another. It is not uncommon for users to provide one another with copies of software, so depriving the software house of a sale, or worse for so called pirates to illicitly copy someone elses software for sale. The attractions of that are obvious in that profit can be made with no expenditure on design and development of the pirated software.
One attempted solution to the problem was the copy protected disk. The floppy disk is protected in such a way that it cannot be copied. That is all very well except that there is no distinction between copying by authorised users and illicit copying. The authorised user may want to make copies for several reasons, but the problem is really acute when the user has a hard disk drive. Here the user would expect to transfer bought software from floppy disk to the hard disk storage. With a copy protected disk that cannot be done. So the poor user has to load the software from floppy disk into memory each time it is to be used, which rather detracts from the usefulness of the hard disk drive.